How to query TCP connection state in go? - tcp

Question

On the client side of a TCP connection, I am attempting to to reuse established connections as much as possible to avoid the overhead of dialing every time I need a connection. Fundamentally, it's connection pooling, although technically, my pool size just happens to be one.
I'm running into a problem in that if a connection sits idle for long enough, the other end disconnects. I've tried using something like the following to keep connections alive:
err = conn.(*net.TCPConn).SetKeepAlive(true)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
return
}
err = conn.(*net.TCPConn).SetKeepAlivePeriod(30*time.Second)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
return
}
But this isn't helping. In fact, it's causing my connections to close sooner. I'm pretty sure this is because (on a Mac) this means the connection health starts being probed after 30 seconds and then is probed at 8 times at 30 second intervals. The server side must not be supporting keepalive, so after 4 minutes and 30 seconds, the client is disconnecting.
There might be nothing I can do to keep an idle connection alive indefinitely, and that would be absolutely ok if there were some way for me to at least detect that a connection has been closed so that I can seamlessly replace it with a new one. Alas, even after reading all the docs and scouring the blogosphere for help, I can't find any way at all in go to query the state of a TCP connection.
There must be a way. Does anyone have any insight into how that can be accomplished? Many thanks in advance to anyone who does!
EDIT:
Ideally, I'd like to learn how to handle this, low-level with pure go-- without using third-party libraries to accomplish this. Of course if there is some library that does this, I don't mind being pointed in its direction so I can see how they do it.

Answer 1

The socket api doesn't give you access to the state of the connection. You can query the current state it in various ways from the kernel (/proc/net/tcp[6] on linux for example), but that doesn't make any guarantee that further sends will succeed.
I'm a little confused on one point here. My client is ONLY sending data. Apart from acking the packets, the server sends nothing back. Reading doesn't seem an appropriate way to determine connection status, as there's noting TO read.
The socket API is defined such that that you detect a closed connection by a read returning 0 bytes. That's the way it works. In Go, this is translated to a Read returning io.EOF. This will usually be the fastest way to detect a broken connection.
So am I supposed to just send and act on whatever errors occur? If so, that's a problem because I'm observing that I typically do not get any errors at all when attempting to send over a broken pipe-- which seems totally wrong
If you look closely at how TCP works, this is the expected behavior. If the connection is closed on the remote side, then your first send will trigger an RST from the server, fully closing the local connection. You either need to read from the connection to detect the close, or if you try to send again you will get an error (assuming you've waited long enough for the packets to make a round trip), like "broken pipe" on linux.
To clarify... I can dial, unplug an ethernet cable, and STILL send without error. The messages don't get through, obviously, but I receive no error
If the connection is actually broken, or the server is totally unresponsive, then you're sending packets off to nowhere. The TCP stack can't tell the difference between packets that are really slow, packet loss, congestion, or a broken connection. The system needs to wait for the retransmission timeout, and retry the packet a number of times before failing. The standard configuration for retries alone can take between 13 and 30 minutes to trigger an error.
What you can do in your code is
Turn on keepalive. This will notify you of a broken connection more quickly, because the idle connection is always being tested.
Read from the socket. Either have a concurrent Read in progress, or check for something to read first with select/poll/epoll (Go usually uses the first)
Set timeouts (deadlines in Go) for everything.
If you're not expecting any data from the connection, checking for a closed connection is very easy in Go; dispatch a goroutine to read from the connection until there's an error.
notify := make(chan error)
go func() {
buf := make([]byte, 1024)
for {
n, err := conn.Read(buf)
if err != nil {
notify <- err
return
}
if n > 0 {
fmt.Println("unexpected data: %s", buf[:n])
}
}
}()

Answer 2

There is no such thing as 'TCP connection state', by design. There is only what happens when you send something. There is no TCP API, at any level down to the silicon, that will tell you the current state of a TCP connection. You have to try to use it.
If you're sending keepalive probes, the server doesn't have any choice but to respond appropriately. The server doesn't even know that they are keepalives. They aren't. They are just duplicate ACKs. Supporting keepalive just means supporting sending keepalives.